How Was Everyone’s Holiday?

We’ve almost reached the end of our first day back to work after the holiday season and boy are my everythings tired! It’s hard (“hard”) (not hard) (I apologize for even suggesting in jest that it is hard) to look for red hot celebrity gossip and buzzworthy viral vids all day when your mind is still on Twilight Zone marathons and dressing fancy and eating everything and taking a nap whenever you feel like it and having a fancy cocktail during the daytime. WHERE DID THE GOOD TIMES GO? How were your good times? Were they good or not so good? Was your holiday like Eva Mendes’s, meaning was it without Ryan Gosling for reasons about which we can and MUST speculate? Or was it like Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux’s, meaning did you take a vacation to a resort in Cabo San Lucas with John Krasinski and Emily Blunt and Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Kimmel’s wife, and also did you meet up with George Clooney and Stacy Keibler for dinner one night? Somewhere in between? A little of one, a bit of the other? Mine was good! I went home for a while, I came back to my Brooklyn home for a while, I ended up seeing Les Mis twice, not because I wanted to see it twice necessarily but also I didn’t mind because I thought it was actually very good. New Year’s Eve was stupid but fine, like it always is. Did you listen to Gabe on the Yo, Is This Racist?podcast? I did, but DON’T TELL HIM. How many times did you see Les Mis? Did you see Django Unchained and pretty much love it even though you had a few problems with it like everybody else? (I did not see it.) (I will someday, probably!) How is your family doing? Did you get the WiiU games you wanted? HOW WAS YOUR HOLIDAY?

Comments (79)

I went to the town where my mum’s family is from and my sister now lives, and went snowshoeing and saw awesome aunts and uncles and cousins, but then I got sick on Christmas day so I ate not a bite of turkey the entire holiday. Which is a bummer.
New Year’s Eve was pretty ok, I went out with cooler, more attractive friends to a bar and therefore looked cooler and more attractive by association and didn’t have to wait in line because 5 pretty girls, are you kidding me? And as discussed, any NYE where I am not stood up by a boyfriend is a good one so far!
Also I took the train through the rockies and bought myself new xc skis and that’s pretty great.

I saw Les Mis once and liked it with caveats, and I also saw Anna Karenina and I liked that too, if for no other reason than it was very pretty to look at and it entertained me for most of the running time!

Also yay 2013! I am optimistic right now but I was also unable to sleep last night so it could be fatigue-related delusion breaking through. That wold explain why my face is melting at any rate.

Not to be a grinch, but I’m really glad the holidays are over! They were very stressful for me/my family this year and my unexpected health problems didn’t really put me in the holiday spirit (though getting the all-clear from the doctors the day after Christmas was a FABULOUS gift). But considering everything, it didn’t end up being so bad. My sister (the one I gave a Taylor Swift blanket to) gave me a Star Wars cookbook, so it’s nice to know that my family knows me well.

I didn’t get much time off work (just Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Year’s Day) but there was nothing to do so I ended up getting paid to mostly sit around looking at Benedict Cumberbatch GIFs all day for a week.

My Grandma heard that “Argo” was a movie about a “mission,” so she took another old woman from her church to the theater to watch it. There she discovered, to her dismay, that though the movie was indeed about a “mission” that did not make any of the characters “missionaries.”

Initially, I spent a lot of time with my mentally abusive uncle in an attempt to get his fortune. He died after he fell down the stairs, and I learned at the reading of the will that I could get the fortune as long as I took care of his latest invention — a robot programmed to be exactly like him.

To add to the family drama, I also went to a different wealthy relative’s reading of the will and had to wear a mask for many hours to get my share of his fortune. And now? Well, let’s just say I am using said fortune to buy some well-needed plastic surgery.

Later, the power went out in my neighborhood, which sucked. At first it was fine until some stupid teenager starts talking about the comet that went by a few minutes before and how it related to his comic book. So, naturally, everyone started freaking out.

Thankfully a guy came over later and I was able to use my mythical beetle to steal his youth so I can stay beautiful forever… which is especially important because after all of this holiday chaos, I FINALLY have some time to myself to read!!

I was eating some wheat thins on the evening of the 23rd and one of my back teeth cracked in half! Yay! Of course I couldn’t see anyone until the 26th, but luckily my dentist squeezed me in and I spent all morning there and then came back in the afternoon for more. So like 3.5 hours of drilling, etc. And I’m out $3k! Yay again.

But the rest was OK. Very mellow. The highlight was me and my boyfriend “sneaking*” our golden retriever on to the subway and then the LIRR. We pleasantly surprised his family by having him at the train station.

My fiance and I live within a short drive of both our families, so we were able to spend a lot of time with both sides without having to really travel. That makes us very lucky, and we were happy to be able to spend our vacation time relaxing rather than going places in planes. I reached my reading goal for the year, and we watched the whole season of Girls, which I liked very much.

Last Christmas was a terrible disaster because of some weird family stuff that involved my dad rejecting my Christmas gift because he was mad at his dad and taking it out on everyone. This year, he was more or less a normal person, and our family time was pretty great. I also hung out with a lot of friends who were in town for the holidays, who I only see maybe once a year. So all in all, Santa was good to me this holiday season.

I’ve been lying to people IRL because it’s so sad, but I’ll tell you monsters the truth. I got stood up by my friend at the last minute (9:30p) on New Year’s Eve so I stayed home alone watching Homeland. I was fairly certain that he was lying about his reason, but my suspicions were confirmed when he pocket-dialed me while having sex later. So I can say without a doubt that it was my worst New Year’s Eve ever.

I played a lot of Just Dance 4 with my niece, and You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful by One Direction was the most fun and we danced to it 1000 times. It’s been stuck in my head ever since! Between that and this afternoon’s arrival of the package of presents I mailed to myself because they couldn’t fit in my luggage, it’s like Christmas never ended!

I drank a lot of wine on Christmas, which made everything quite tolerable. My family ended up watching How to Train Your Dragon and Kung-Fu Pand, good times were had by all. I love that family doesn’t talk about problems, we suppress them on major holidays.

I got very hammered on New Years and had a rough morning. The whole night was very “eh” overall, although I looked very adorable (which no one really noticed). Also, one of my friends made crab rangoon and my roommate made guacamole, so that was tasty delicious at 3am. And we blasted Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which probably annoyed the neighbors.

Christmas weekend was very very busy, spent sleep-deprivedly driving all over southeastern Virginia to see all of my family and my husband’s family and all of our friends, and it was NUTS and exhausting but fun. Then New Year’s weekend was the actual opposite of that, where we got to lay around in pajamas, watch movies on our new TV, eat chocolate and drink booze without ever showering, ever.

I watched Les Mis yesterday, and I liked it pretty well. Got to see my grandparents before Christmas, and that was nice because they are great, and my grandma made my favorite cranberry salad. On New Year’s Eve, I had the most delicious pimento cheese sandwich. I read Every You, Every Me by David Levithan, and it was much better than I expected because I had not read good things. Not my favorite of his books, but good! And I had a handbell performance on Sunday, and it went really well!
On a more serious note, I found on Sunday that my coworker who recently came back from a kidney transplant might have shingles. She had a high fever over Christmas, and I am just really worried about her health. Thankfully, her illnesses have not come from being around people, but it is worrisome all the same.

My family will be coming up in shifts over the next couple of weekends, so while Mr. Dork and I had a lovely quiet holiday, the next few weeks will not be fun. This also made the third consecutive year that I got drunk, puked, and watched the Twilight Zone marathon in a semi-concious state. We did see Django Unchained, and while there were some issues (QT’s accent, I’m looking your way) on the whole I liked it. Also, I got my grades in and that made me very happy, and I’m hoping one of my professors will help me hone a paper I wrote so that I can take it to conferences. Yay, 2013!

It was the best I can remember. The last few years, my wife and I visited my parents for Christmas, and it was just the four of us adults. It was 10% nice to see them and 90% a total drag watching basic cable and waiting to go home.

This spring, my wife’s family immigrated from Eastern Europe. We spent our Christmas with her family this year, which meant spending all day playing with their little girls, ages 2 and 4. I love my wife very much, but I’ve never known love like I do with those girls. If we were here in person, I’d insist on showing you some pictures and then holding your head under the water until you admitted that they were the most beautiful little girls you’ve ever seen. I could have died of happiness.

I spent all day Christmas Eve in the airport (LAX) on standby, because the Supershuttle driver took too long getting to the airport even though I woke up at 3:30am to go stand out in the rain and wait for him. It Super Sucked but I came back and got on a plane the next morning and made it to Denver eventually. Had good snow fun (inner-tubing, snowshoeing via moonlight, etc.), and spent some quality time with my little nieces, but man was it super cold.

Coming back to LA I got stuck in the Denver airport for millions of hours because the flight got delayed from somewhere else even colder. But it worked out OK because of the bar. I met some new friends there, and it turned out by sheer chance they were also sitting right next to me on the plane. As luck would have it, they offered us free direct TV and free drinks because we had to wait so many hours. Needless to say my new friends and I drank ALL of the drinks and had to be shushed by the flight attendants several times because we were having so much fun. So that was pretty cool.

My Christmas was the best one of my adult life perhaps? Everyone gave each other thoughtful gifts, one of my sisters brought her two adorable cats home with her, the other sister introduced me to the marvel that is her Slanket. And I only had one fight with my mom, in which I yelled at her loudly because she and my stepdad announced a plan to purchase guns in case the government outlaws having guns sometime soon. They are both intense new-agers (my stepdad works as a psychic, and I wish that was a lie but it is not), and my mom raised us vegetarian, so this whole “we need guns now” thing is incredibly illogical besides just being disturbing and stupid. But they aren’t really people known for following through with the things they say they’ll do, so maybe the gun thing won’t happen, and everything else really was quite nice. I got a Kindle and it is the best thing I own, maybe.

I’m going into space! Err…I mean my name really does rhyme with Messica not Mate Minslet, of course why would you think that NEVERMIND.

jk my name is Jessica and I will totally run your relatives over in a fire. But I had a good holiday because I have wine and a mixer now and I went home to see some snow and Time Bobby was declared the best CBB of the year as it should be.

I was sick pretty much the whole time and I am still not feeling 100%…other than THAT though I had a great holiday with my family…didn’t do much since we were all under the weather but at least nothing truly bad happened. Got some nice gifts and had good times other than all the coughing. This was the first Christmas/Channukah that my son could really get into it so it was nice in that respect too!

The usual: family, food, booze, presents. Plus, between X-Mas vacation, NYE, and the days in between where I worked from home, I’ve been going to bed super late, and last night it caught up to me and punched me in the face at the office.

I took my vacation week before my job closed for break. I spent the first 3 days sleeping all day and staying up all night for my multimedia final which involved making a website with 5 pages, Flash aspects, and thumbnail photos. The first day off I had a final for my tv research and sales class. I aced both classes, goodness gracious. Then I spent every day up until today sleeping in and eating cookies, sometimes eating cookies on my bed (I look like Liz Lemon but have a Cookie Monster appetite/obsessiveness). I avoided taking the subway and doing anything that involved a commute. I am also 8 inches into a violet blanket I’m knitting for myself.
For Christmas I got a new jacket and cool stuff, most notably one of these in my favorite shade of cat: orange (and white):http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51o0g4wsZUL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

On Xmas my friends and I had Bishop mulled wine (red wine simmered in a pot with a baked orange stuffed with cloves). I had two glasses, and fell asleep for at least 30 minutes after each glass while my friends played the first chapter of The Walking Dead XBox game. Then we had meat pie, which called for lamb but my friend sprung for veal, which I think is the first time I’ve had veal. Anyway, the whole thing was delicious.

On New Years the same two friends plus a couple more gathered to drink and be merry, played a little Rock Band 3, sang Suffragette City, then my friend and I wound up joking about a bunch of inappropriate stuff that was not serious at all but was about very sensitive subject matter that I don’t want to get into because it was seriously, embarrassingly inappropriate (but to give you the gist as to what may have spawned our drunken horribleness, we both work together and had to take similar employee training online classes earlier that day about what is and is not acceptable behavior in the workplace), and then Return of the Jedi was on tv.

My holiday was pretty wonderful – and I’m technically still on vacation until next week because I work for a school, which is awesome but also means that I am SO POOR every January. Anyway, I’m from a very unique small town and I love coming home, but the holidays are always really intense because there are SO many people I know in town and only some of them are people I have any interest in seeing. But this break was particularly wonderful because I was much more social than usual and managed to have a great time seeing only people that I love or at least whose company I enjoy.

My sister wasn’t in town (in Germany with her fiancee, boo), but on Christmas some family friends came over and their ten-year-old and I were on the same Cranium team and even though everyone said she wouldn’t know it she guessed “Robocop” on the first try when I acted it out.

Other than that it’s been – smoking hash and watching Game Of Thrones with my friend’s dad; totally loving the rain; going out crabbing for the first time; eating fresh duck hunted by my dad and dog; eating soft boiled eggs out of my new egg cups; eating everything, basically; doing an excellent job NOT making out with (and possibly breaking irreparably) my ex-boyfriend’s best friend who I’ve wanted to bone for years but who, last time I checked, is a virgin; watching Web Therapy with my mom, the therapist; spending as much time in possible with my best friend who was living in China for most of 2012; seeing Les Mis and loving it WAY MORE than I ever thought I would; having a mini version of the annual Arrested Development marathon I used to host (“Motherboy XXXVI”); playing with my dogs, snuggling with my dogs, loving my dogs and never ever wanting to leave them.

This was the first Christmas since my boyfriend of 11 years and I broke up. For whatever reason I decided to torture myself and spend a few days with him (I moved to SoCal after the break) wherein he drove me to my family and they all asked him to spend the night. He didn’t; we kissed, he left, and I cried. My mom gave me a Xanax and I spent most of Christmas day passed out on the couch inbetween opening presents and pouting.

I still kind of feel like I ruined Christmas for my family.

Needless to say, I was relieved a bit to leave the Pacific Northwest and head back to to this place that I am trying my best to make home.

Some parts good, some parts great, some parts lame. Christmas was fun except that I didn’t get to see my family because I saw them a week before Christmas, but I got to hang out with my husband’s family (who are all very nice but who don’t drink alcohol at holidays…so you know). I got some great gifts and the gifts I gave were all very well received! In fact I think everyone loved them! I got some time off from work which was nice, but my husband had to work the whole time because this is their busiest time of year, so that’s kinda lame. Then New Year’s Eve was pretty fun including playing Flip Cup even though I’m almost 30 and the rest of the party people were trying to talk me into having a baby. Also in the past couple of days my dog has been being very bad and eating the cat food which will hurt his insides, so we’re really worried about him but mostly mad at him for being bad and doing what he’s not supposed to! But! Yesterday I found out that my husband’s company is paying for a trip to Riviera Cancun for both of us! Awesome!

My Christmas present to myself is a new kitten, who will be coming home with me as soon as she’s big enough to be fixed. But my most exciting Christmas gift was the cat bed my sister made me out of an old tv, it is the best! I really love homemade gifts (I painted a Hulk comic for her) and this one was truly perfect. And then I made everyone watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special and tried to explain what happened to Rory and Amy during commercial breaks.

New Year’s was pretty fun, drank responsibly (read, not much). Ruled at all the drinking games by passing the drinks on to my teammates and was told by a drunk acquaintance that I was her ‘Ideal Woman.’ Which I was flattered by? But she has a husband? Ah well, it was nice to hear after my pre-Christmas break up.

This is just a great thread, every time. Sorry I missed it yesterday, but now I’m caught up… My own Christmas was maybe the best since 2000. Everything just came together nicely and everyone (family & friends) seemed genuinely happy. It even snowed a mess.

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